FBI’s Robert Mueller: Feds need broader surveillance powers

FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers — some already skeptical of government surveillance — that the feds may need additional powers to track down criminals who hide their activities online.

Buried in his prepared testimony Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mueller reaffirmed the Obama administration’s long-held view that there’s a “growing gap between law enforcement’s legal authority to conduct electronic surveillance, and its ability to conduct such surveillance.”

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“The rapid pace of advances in mobile and other communication technologies continues to present a significant challenge for conducting court-approved electronic surveillance of criminals and terrorists,” Mueller noted.

“Because of this gap, law enforcement is increasingly unable to gain timely access to the information to which it is lawfully authorized and that it needs to protect public safety, bring criminals to justice and keep America safe,” added the FBI director, acknowledging there still exists a need to balance security and privacy.

The FBI and Justice Department for years have explored remedies to its so-called going dark problem — instances in which suspects communicate using Internet services that aren’t so easily subject to court-ordered wiretaps.

At one point, reports this year suggested law enforcement agencies even had bandied about a proposal that could fine large Internet companies that don’t build their services in a way to aid those investigations. The White House, however, said at the time it had not signed off on any new plan.

The efforts to expand federal law known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act hit fresh resistance in May, after news broke that the DOJ had sought phone records for some Associated Press journalists. Civil-liberties groups, privacy-minded lawmakers and top Internet companies expressed unease with any plan to expand federal wiretapping powers.

Now the controversy over surveillance at the NSA — a driving topic at the Wednesday hearing — may only further complicate matters, or so privacy hawks hope.

The FBI needs “to provide better reasons and more information about why they need this, when technologists and academics across the board are consistently saying and have shown … the whole ‘going dark’ messaging is incorrect in the golden age of surveillance,” said Mark Jaycox, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He described the FBI’s pursuit of additional surveillance authority as “breathtaking.”

The Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate committees that would oversee such a debate didn’t comment for this story.

Mueller, though, told the Senate Judiciary Committee the need is real — and he urged lawmakers to help ensure “law enforcement capabilities keep pace with new threats and new technology, while at the same time protecting individual privacy rights and civil rights.”

“It is only by working together — within the law enforcement and intelligence communities, with our private sector partners and with members of Congress — that we will find a long-term solution to this growing problem,” Mueller noted in his prepared testimony.